The lies of the Fraser Institute

A Canadian conservative think tank called the Fraser Institute recently released the 2020 revision of the Economic Freedom of the World report, their version of an “economic freedom index”.

Fraser’s index is often used by Fraser staff and opinion columnists to denigrate socialism and leftism, with lower scores taken to indicate more socialistic countries and higher scores taken to indicate more free market capitalist countries. 

This is incorrect. Most of Fraser’s index has nothing to do with left-right policy divides in government. In this note, I will show what the index actually measures. 

This note was written and designed by Oliver Mackenzie and was published on December 29, 2020.